Development of the Print Archives Preservation Registry[3] (PAPR), has enabled CRL to provide significant support for analysis of serials data and holding recordsby many print archiving initiatives. Highlights of recent work include:

Scholars Trust: In 2015, Scholars Trust[4] contributed over 19,000 records to PAPR. Records from 25 different institutions were exported from the Trust's JRNL database. Before loading the records into PAPR, CRL reviewed bibliographic elements of each title to ensure the data was in scope for PAPR and in sync with OCLC records. CRL also reviewed holdings to ensure they were on the proper bibliographic record. Where possible, holdings were normalized for consistency of expression.

To assist participating institutions' goal of maintaining local holdings records (LHRs) for retained titles, CRL provided LHRs from the records contributed to PAPR. Reports for each contributing institution were returned to the Scholars Trust coordinator to pass on to the appropriate metadata specialist at each institution. Reports included a list of records with normalized holdings that could be contributed to PAPR without further work, as well as problematic records for which further review and reconciliation were necessary. Scholars Trust libraries reviewed these records and made corrections as necessary. CRL continues to refine its processes for automating record review to make the remaining manual review more efficient.

CIC Shared Print Repository: CRL’s data analysis team worked with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation's Shared Print Repository[5] (CIC-SPR) to automate the generation of “waterfall” reports—reports of item records aggregated from 13 institutions used to progressively identify complete holdings of targeted journals. In three separate batches, CRL compiled holdings of serials from publishers Springer and Wiley as well as approximately 850 journals published by scientific scholarly societies. Resulting reports (consisting of separate institutional reports as well as aggregated title/holding lists) were used to generate lists of potential holdings for contribution to CIC’s shared repository. CRL expects to work with CIC on additional title lists.

University of California Shared Print Program: Through cooperation with the California Digital Library (CDL), CRL supported the efforts of the University of California (UC) Libraries Shared Print Program[6] to assess UC unarchived journal holdings for potential print retention. In this instance, CRL provided direct support to CDL to perform the collection analysis of UC holdings using the PAPR Collections Analysis System developed by CDL. The collections analysis system compared MARC journal holdings for all UC libraries’ unarchived titles and proposed lists for archiving through UC’s Journal Archiving Campaign Service (JACS). This analysis identified 524,798 eligible volumes for the preliminary JACS campaign, of which 21,220 volumes (378 journal backfiles) were selected for archiving in 2015–16.

As a result of this work, CRL can provide data services for individual CRL member libraries . CRL’s data normalization and collections analysis support are tangible outcomes of the efforts CRL has made to build its data management capabilities, increasing the amount and granularity of data on what is being archived.

CRL is grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institutue of Museum and Library Services for supporting development of these new capabilities, and to the Scholars Trust, CIC and CDL for helping us test and refine these services. CRL welcomes expressions of interest from its members as well as other community initiatives to explore ways in which our expertise might further benefit current serials archiving programs.